Two Chinese women missing in Thailand found, returned home safely

Two Chinese women who were reported missing after arriving in Thailand last week have been found in a third country and returned home, a senior Thai police officer said on Tuesday.

Pol Gen Thatchai Pitaneelaboot, national police inspector general, said that Wu Jiaqi, 21, and her friend had been found by Chinese authorities and were safely transported to China.

Thatchai said Wu’s father filed a missing-person complaint at Suvarnabhumi Airport Police Station on January 7. He told police that his daughter and her friend had arrived in Thailand on January 6 and he had not heard from her since.

Investigators found that the two women travelled in a white van from the airport to a hotel in Bangkok’s Lat Krabang area and spent a night there. They checked out at 9am the next day but their leaving the hotel was not recorded on closed-circuit TV because of a camera malfunction, Thatchai said.

He said police later learned that the two women had travelled on to a third country, prompting Thai police to coordinate with Chinese authorities to search for them.

Thatchai said Chinese authorities found the pair and returned them home on Monday, while Wu’s father has withdrawn the complaint made to Suvarnabhumi Airport police as well as thanking Thai authorities for their assistance.

Wu’s father told reporters that his daughter and her friend were found at the same place authorities had found Xingxing, a Chinese actor who was abducted from Thailand to Myanmar earlier this month.

On January 7, Myanmar authorities located the actor, whose real name is Wang Xing, in Shwe Koko, a town notorious for Chinese-run call-centre scams on the border with Thailand’s Tak province.

Xingxing told Thai police that he had been kidnapped by a Chinese gang after being lured to Thailand via a WeChat invitation for a film shoot. The gang held him captive in Myanmar, forcing him to train people in use of chat apps to scam victims in China.